Recently, a digital microscope which is capable of displaying shape information from whole of an object under test to a cell tissue as an electronic image including the scaling on a monitor has been proposed.
Patent Literature 1 discloses a virtual microscope that attaches a plurality of taken images obtained with high magnification and high resolution to form an image of the whole of the object under test. Generally, an image pickup method of obtaining images with high magnification one by one for the whole of the object under test takes much time. In microscope systems disclosed in Patent Literature 2 and Patent Literature 3, a high-resolution object lens is prepared although a field of view of observation is large. They disclose methods (apparatuses) of devising configurations of image pickup units to take an image with high magnification at high speed.
Generally, it is very difficult to prepare an image pickup element having a size in which images can be simultaneously taken for a wide field of view. Therefore, in the microscope systems disclosed in Patent Literature 2 and Patent Literature 3, a plurality of image pickup elements are disposed in the image pickup unit in order to take an image having of a wide field of view. In these microscope systems, a sample or the image pickup unit is driven more than once in one plane while taking images to form a whole image by synthesizing the taken images. Thus, the microscope system that obtains the shape information from the whole of the object under test to the cell tissue as an image is disclosed.